This superb account of the causes of the first world war begins in 1903 with the murder of Alexander I of Serbia by a secretive terrorist network called the Black Hand. They went on to organise the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, which resulted in the bloodbaths of the Somme, Verdun and Gallipoli. Germany has usually been blamed for escalating the conflict, but Clark refuses to play the blame game, arguing that the Germans were not alone in their paranoid imperialism. The more convincing and terrifying reality is that no nation really meant to wage war, but each sleepwalked into it. Clark brilliantly puts this illogical conflict into context, showing how pre-1914 Europe was inherently unstable, riven by ethnic and nationalistic factions. He also suggests that the European elites who vied to prove their virility in battle were suffering from a "crisis of masculinity". Could it really be that the war began because upper-class statesmen and generals felt threatened by the rise of previously marginalised "proletarian and non-white" men?